OLD CARY GRANT JUST FINE

I have, by degrees, and by default, become a cat person.  This surprises me a bit.  When I was a kid I desperately wanted a dog but my parents thought I wasn’t ready for the responsibility, and that I’d never walk it.  They were almost certainly right.

These days, however, I sometimes think it would be OK to have a dog because I could combine exercising it with my psychogeographic drifts, although in the end I think I’m still not ready for the responsibility.  And in any case, I have become a cat person.

The cat, not much of a walker.

A cat joined the household, some years ago now, and she has gradually seduced me – (and yes, there was some inappropriate touching along the way, on her part).  And once in a while I think maybe I could combine my own walking with cat walking,  with the feline striding along beside me on a leash, although I’m told this is only possible if you start when the cat is very young indeed. 

And so the other night I watched Harry and Tonto, a pretty good, if very much of its time (1974), movie about an old geezer (Art Carney who is actually playing a character much older than himself) who goes on a road trip with his cat Tonto, who indeed has a collar and a leash.  They end up on Hollywood Boulevard opposite Pickwick Books and yes, that is Larry Hagman:

Pickwick Books used to look like this on the inside:

Why can’t there be a bookshop like this in Hollywood anymore?  Well, we all know exactly why, but still …

Anyway it so happens I’ve had the above picture of Cary Grant sitting on my desktop for quite a while now. I read the street names, and realized that location is just round the corner from where I go to see my doctor.  In fact when I go to see him I always take a stroll around the neighborhood to calm myself before the appointment.  So last week when I went for another check up I decide to drift along to Swall and Charleville and try to find the corner where old Cary and his cat did their walking.  How hard could it be?

Finding the crossroads was no problem, but it was hard even to tell which corner Cary had been on.  There were some obvious changes - the streets signs and their poles had been replaced, and some had apparently gone completely, the mail box had gone, hedges had grown up everywhere, and I could see no sign of the house. 

I thought the chimney  and those arches in the Cary Grant picture would have been the give away, but I couldn’t see them either.  I was starting to think the house must have been demolished and replaced but then something clicked.

A wall had been built in front of the arches, the chimney was still there but it had been modified and was lost in the trees, but that front door, that window with the bars - not identical - but then 60 years have gone by - but I'm prepared to bet that’s the house old Cary and his (or somebody else’s) cat had walked in front of, possibly only for that one photograph. 

I can’t find any hard evidence that he lived there, or even in the neighborhood, so I guess he was probably there just for a photo op.

And then, much belatedly, it occurred to me that maybe the picture is an ironic take on his appearance in Bringing Up Baby,  but I don’t have any hard evidence for that either.

WALKING AND LEANING

One of the smaller regrets in my life is that when I was unemployed in Sheffield in the 1980s I turned down the chance to become an apprentice dry stone waller.  How very different life might have been.   Maybe – and I realize this is very, very unlikely – I could have ended up as land artist in the mold of Andy Goldsworthy.

There’s a new documentary about him, titled Leaning Into the Wind, and in the trailer he says, “There are two ways of looking at the world.  You can walk down the path, or you can walk through the hedge.”

Does anybody still use that phrase “dragged through a hedge backwards”?  My mother used to say it about me when I was looking particularly disheveled, but as I used to point out, if you’re pulled through a hedge backwards you’re going to look rather better than if you’re pulled through it forwards.

Andy Goldsworthy has something in common with walking artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t really use walking as part of his practice.  However, since he’s usually working outdoors, making site specific sculptures, then I suppose he must do a certain amount of walking to get to and from the sites.  The piece below at Storm King, titled Storm King Wall is a length of dry stone walling that runs to 2,278 feet, so a certain amount of walking is required just to get from one end of it to the other.

Actually it’s not even that simple – the wall disappears, as it were, into water and emerges on the other side, so unless you can walk on water a detour is involved.

I’ve also walked around a Goldsworthy in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, this one, called Hanging Trees:  

I know I also saw his Garden of Stones at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but as far as I can remember, at the time I went there you weren’t allowed to walk in it.  

The image below on the museum website suggests you can walk there now, though obviously not very far.

As far as I can see, there's an absence both of paths and hedges.

SCRUTABLE

One way or another I've been walking past this building on Franklin Avenue for the best part of 15 years, and it still intrigues me, and moves me in some quiet way.  Things around it change -  a brand new urban park has just been built nearby, and it's close enough to the Hollywood Freeway that a homeless tent city has grown up nearby but it remains square and solid and inscrutable, essentially unchanged, even if it's a bit frayed at the edges.



I guess it's the inscrutability that's the appeal. It looks like a bit of old Hollywood.  It's not stylish enough to be celebrated as a classic and yet there is something basic and elegant about it, something modernist and formal - form following function.  I like that in a building that I walk past.

It used to look like this:

And this:

WOKE WALKING

Meanwhile, down on Hollywood Boulevard, some folks still seem more woke than others.

DON'T GO THERE

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

SAINTLY WALKING

I was in Bristol, in England, and I walked from the station to a place called the Paintworks – a new “creative quarter” if the website is to be believed. 

Not much of a walk, scarcely more than a mile, though it was cold and damp, and I did walk the same route back again, but long enough to get shouted at by a bicyclist – true I was walking in a cycle lane -  and to see some ruin in the distance:

And some more ruin close up – I do have a bit of a thing for obelisks, ruined or otherwise. (This is one of the few, though possibly not the only way in which I resemble Athanasius Kircher):

And especially there was time to see a couple of quirky depictions of walkers painted on the ground – the saintly fellow at the top of this post and this one carrying a ladder:

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make you think you’ve had a decent walk.

LONDON THEMES

I was in London for one reason or another.  There had been a plan to go for a walk with Iain Sinclair but that fell through because, as he put it, “I did some damage a while back, jumping out of the way of a sudden-turning taxi. All was well. But after coming back from the Hebrides, some of the calf problems returned on London pavements. I need to take a break - and, if possible, see a wonder worker.”  No arguing with that.

And of course I walked anyway, sometimes on my own, sometimes with one or two others, and I looked around, took pictures, and at times observed my fellow pedestrians, most of them just walking as part of their everyday lives and business, others perhaps on some kind of drift or specialized walking project – you can’t always tell with these things, although I did see one or two groups of tourists who were being herded around on organized walking tours – they tended to look simply bemused.

I had the sense in central London of walking around a giant building site, that will become a post-Brexit, giant architectural theme park.  There are cranes and scaffolding everywhere.  And this is in one sense exciting – new forms and new possibilities are coming into being.  There’s an optimism, a confidence, a belief that the city does have some kind of future, even if an uncertain and contested one.

On the other hand, most of us will only ever walk past these glossy new architectural constructions.  They really don’t involve or embrace the “average” Londoner, whatever that is.  We are certainly never likely to live in any of the new super luxury flats.  And I suppose you could argue that this has always been the way of things , as true of Centre Point as of Buckingham Palace: you walk past, you see the exterior, you know in broad terms what you’re looking at, but you don’t get invited inside.  Nobody’s building any people’s palaces.

     Where there’s change there’s also decay.  There was a short period of my life when I worked as a gallery attendant at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank, and every day I’d walk out of Waterloo station and go into a kind of pedestrian tunnel/bridge that ran through the Shell Centre.  

The building is still there, and a little research reveals that it’s still owned by Shell, though I couldn’t see any external sign to that effect.  

But whereas it once looked like a smart, if slightly old-fashioned, 1950s office block, it now looks in significant decline.  Of course some of us enjoy a good bit of significant decline.

And I suppose street art flourishes in these times of transition.  When buildings are being built or demolished, when there are hoardings around them, people don’t get too upset about works of art painted on boards or abandoned walls, although presumably once the sparkling new architectural masterpieces are finished the artists are going to be way less welcome. 

And it may just be me, but I got the feeling there was something a bit last millennium about London’s street art.  I mean Banksy is obviously a good guy, but does his art really need to be protected by large sheets of Perspex?  Isn’t street art meant to be transient and at the mercy of the elements, human and otherwise?  And do I really need to be able to buy a Banksy in an art gallery in the spruced up Shipping Container House?  Well no, I do not and I wouldn’t be able to afford one even if I did.

         On the other hand, it’s hard to walk down Goodge Street and not be somehow moved and uplifted by this depiction of Theresa May, not by Banksy as far as I know, and not under Perspex either.